—Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence, 1957
Day 1: Monastic Idol
A full three hours before sunrise, as the monks of l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille de Fontenelle were in Vigils, the first of the day’s seven services, I was headed to my own chapel of sorts—the abbey four-nil, or bakehouse—crossing the enormous courtyard under the chilly and starry Norman sky with my bucket of levain, acutely aware of the crunching of the gravel under my feet. Something above caught my eye, and I stopped and looked heavenward.
The world stopped with me.
Total, utter stillness. Not a sound to be heard anywhere, no voices, no traffic from the town outside the abbey walls. No early-morning birds, no distant barking dogs, not even the sound of my own breathing, which must have ceased for the moment as I absorbed the wondrous sight before me. To the east, directly above the abbey church, a star shone brightly, more brightly than any star I’d ever seen in any sky, a star that burned, I thought, surely as bright as the star of Bethlehem. Venus? Maybe, but I’d never seen the second planet from the sun shine so brilliantly. I looked for another explanation — perhaps there was an astronomical event, say, a supernova, that I was unaware of. It was possible; I hadn’t seen a newspaper for weeks. Or was it the air over Normandy?
I wanted to stay in that spot, just staring at the sky endlessly, but instead I set the world’s machinery in motion again, continuing across the courtyard to the dark, chilly bakery. It was time to feed the levain.
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I had arrived by taxi the previous morning after taking a long, luxurious, and badly needed bath at the little hotel in Yvetot, which I’d found at midnight almost by accident, when I feared I was lost. As I lay soaking in the tub, washing off Morocco, sending deep heat into my tired back, I wondered if my project had not better be abandoned. I would’ve been quite content to stay put in the hotel for a few days, taking baths, sampling Norman cuisine, and lying in the soft king-size bed while watching French television coverage of the rail strike that had paralyzed the nation. I had indeed been on the last train out of Paris.
With my destination at last so close, this entire ridiculous enterprise — posing as an expert baker, baking in an unfamiliar oven, with unfamiliar flour, in an unfamiliar and intimidating place, communicating in a foreign language that I barely spoke — was starting to feel like just about the worst idea ever. I remembered a conversation I’d had with Katie shortly before leaving.
“Dad, what are you going to be doing in France?”
“Training a new baker in a monastery built in 649.”
“You?” she blurted out, her eyes wide. “Why are they trusting you?”
“They think I’m a master baker.”
“How’d they get that idea?”
“I told them I’d won second place in a New York bread contest.”
The last time I saw Katie, she was doubled over in laughter, and justifiably so, but a deal is a deal, a promise is a promise, and having persevered to make it this far, I knew I had to see it through.
My stomach kneaded into a nervous nausea, I stepped out of the cab and through the gates of l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille de Fontenelle. Before I’d gone ten paces, the tension started to drain out of me. The grounds were calming and soothing. Sunlight streamed through the mist, emerging in the kind of rays you see in religious or romantic art but almost never in nature. Before me soared the stone ruins of the ancient church, stark and beautiful under a crisp blue sky. There wasn’t another soul in sight.
Entering a doorway marked RECEPTION, I found an elderly layperson at the desk. I tried to explain in French who I was, but nothing registered. Perhaps I wasn’t expected after all. He tried calling someone, to no avail, so he directed me to the guesthouse outside the abbey walls, directly across the street. I dropped my bags at the door and rang the bell.
No answer. This was some welcoming committee. I was thinking about that king-size bed I’d just left in Yvetot, when a balding, slightly rotund monk in round glasses came scurrying by, his black habit rustling.
“Ah, you must be the baker,” he said rapidly, in a distinctly British accent.
Relieved, I said I was. He looked at the luggage I’d dropped in the doorway.
“Are those your bags?”
They were.
“No, no, no, no, no,” he said rapidly. “He never gets anything right. You are not here. You are inside the abbey, with us.” It was the first time, but not the last, that I’d hear myself included in “us” during the next few days. “Come, come, come, come, come,” said this Dickensian character in a French monastery as he whisked me away.
I struggled to keep up as we crossed the street, dragging my bags back through the abbey gate and into the interior guest-house, where the père hôtelier, or guest keeper — a discouragingly severe-looking fellow whose tightly clipped hair doubled the size of his already generous ears — greeted me with the barest of nods.
“I take you to your cell,” the père hôtelier said in English, the word “cell” reverberating with me as I followed him to a fifth-floor room in a five-story walk-up in what in New York City would be called a prewar building. Except the war that this building was “pre” was the French Revolution.
As we climbed the narrow, ancient spiral staircase, around and around, up and up, motion detectors switched on lights as we reached each landing, an improvement for sure over the dim candlelight that would’ve been the only source of illumination in this dark stairwell for most of its existence. The père hôtelier informed me that lunch followed the 12:45 service (or “office”) called Sext, during which I was to sit in the front row of the church. I was to follow the monks into the refectory immediately after the service. In other words, if I wanted to eat, I was going to church today. I was eager to hear the Gregorian chant for which the abbey is known, but still, the assumption that I would be attending the service was a stark, perhaps intentional reminder that I was a guest at an abbey, not a hotel.
He handed me the key. “You are the only guest at the abbey,” were the guest master’s Bates Motel–esque parting words, making my remote location all the more mysterious.
I certainly hadn’t been assigned the room for the view. The tiny cell was windowless save for one round window so small you’d complain if it was in your berth on a Caribbean budget cruise, and so high up that the only view it provided was of the sky. Otherwise, the room wasn’t bad, with a single bed (nice, firm mattress on a board), a desk, and a sink, but the room’s sharply angled ceiling, following the roofline, reminded me of the kind of attic apartment that rental agents had always shown me in my young, nearly broke days, except that I’d never been in an attic apartment whose ceiling was punctuated by massive hand-hewn beams. Their presence, while undeniably adding a certain ambience, closed the room in even further, literally forcing me to my knees to retrieve clothes from the bureau.
I had been expecting a room with a nice window. Just before leaving home, I’d stumbled upon an out-of-print book by a British writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, who’d come to Saint-Wandrille after World War II, looking for a quiet, contemplative place to do some writing. Later he described his time at Saint-Wandrille and two other monasteries in A Time to Keep Silence. Of course, his visit had occurred over half a century ago, so I didn’t know how relevant it would be to mine. The answer soon became apparent. Hardly anything had changed, except that he had a room with a garden view. A bathroom with two shower stalls and a toilet stood directly across the hall, in effect giving me a private bath. All in all, it was a fine cell.
Ten minutes before Sext (so named because it is, by the old Roman clock, which begins at sunrise, the sixth hour of the twelve-hour day), I pushed open the heavy door of the church and was immediately blinded by the darkness. I stopped for a minute to let my eyes adjust, afraid to take another step for fear of stumbling over a precious relic or a monk. But there were no monks and fewer relics, precious or otherwise, in the austere, bare c
hurch, with one notable exception: a medieval-looking black and gold box, with a glass front, mounted on the wall. I peered through, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I was startled to find someone peering back. It was the thirteen-hundred-year-old skull of the founder of the abbey, Saint Wandrille himself !
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In 649, when the owner of this skull, a monk named Wandrille, came to this pastoral valley to found the abbey that carries his name, Christianity was still in its formative years; Muhammad, the founder of Islam, had been dead just seventeen years; and nearly a millennium would pass before Columbus would land in America.
Wandrille’s abbey, which is said to have boasted a three-hundred-foot-long basilica, flourished until 852, when Viking invaders sacked and burned the buildings. The monks escaped with their lives (and, more importantly, their relics, including the skull of their founder), spending years wandering northern France before finding refuge in Belgium.
In 960 the community returned and rebuilt the abbey, initiating a period of prosperity that saw the abbey’s population grow to three hundred monks and spawned, over the next thousand years, some thirty saints. During the darkest of the Dark Ages, when centuries of knowledge were being destroyed or lost throughout Europe, the monks of Saint-Wandrille and other monasteries throughout Europe kept knowledge alive. Saint-Wandrille was renowned for its school, where not just religion but the arts and sciences were taught. Just as important were its library and scriptorium, where texts sacred and secular were preserved, painstakingly copied and illuminated, protected from the barbarians, and preserved for future generations.
The abbey’s trials were far from over, however. The coming centuries would bring more fires (both accidental and intentional), sackings, governmental interference, and persecutions. Napoleon allowed the magnificent fourteenth-century Gothic cathedral to be used as a convenient “superterranean” stone quarry around 1800, leaving only the ruins standing today. The current church was a fifteenth-century Norman barn that had been disassembled and relocated stone by stone to the abbey, then built into the present church largely with the monks’ own hands from 1967 to 1969.
Unlike the great churches of Europe, with their richly carved furniture, paintings, marble statues, and enormous stained-glass windows, which flood the faithful with colorful filtered light, Saint-Wandrille’s interior was almost barren, its small windows set so deeply in the thick stone walls that whatever light made it into the church was gobbled up by those walls, darkened from years of burning incense. This church was, in fact, as bare, as dark, and as gloomy as the Middle Ages themselves.
I wondered if the very austerity was the point. This was a church built not to attract the community at large or to seduce or intimidate the heathen, but for the use of the monks, who were not here to be entertained. There was nothing in this church to distract them. I would float this theory several days later to Brother Christophe, the Dickensian monk who’d brought me into the abbey that first day. He agreed, but added, “Still, it could be lighter. It’s so bloody dark!” There was, however, one notable source of ever-present radiance: a spotlighted, nearly life-size gold crucifix almost magically levitating over the altar, suspended on thin chains that were all but invisible at certain times of the day. The position of Christ, his back arching out from the cross, added to the feeling of levitation, giving the impression that he might simply free his bonds and soar from the cross, down the length of the church, at any moment.
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My eyes having adjusted to the darkness, I took a seat in the second pew, ignoring the guest keeper’s instructions to sit in the first because it was roped off from the rows behind (did he mean the first pew, or the first pew behind the rope?). Services are open to the public, but there were only two other people in the church, both elderly. Waiting for Sext to start, I became dimly aware of an uncomfortable sensation. My feet were freezing. In fact, my entire body was becoming chilled, even though it was shirtsleeve weather outside. I made a mental note to “dress for church”—meaning, in this case, to wear every piece of clothing I’d brought with me.
The huge church bells rang out, and the monks filed into the church in their black robes from a passageway behind the altar. Actually they didn’t so much file in as amble in over a period of several minutes, during which we three laypeople stood in respect. The monks, about thirty in all, arrived in ones and twos, taking their places in the choir, two rows of choir stalls on each side of the altar, facing one another. As would be the case with every service I attended, a few stragglers came in late, after the service had started.
The abbot, who looked to be about eighty, entered last. Then the service began, fifteen minutes of nearly unbroken Gregorian chanting of the psalms, the two sides of the choir alternating verses, answering each other in stirring antiphony. The voices, particularly from several of the young soloists, were so beautiful that I later jokingly asked if you had to audition to become a monk. What a great idea for a reality show, I thought: Monastic Idol.
The psalms were sung in Latin as our little congregation followed the monks through a baffling sequence of standing, bowing, and sitting. Or almost sitting. The monks in the choir never got to sit for this brief service. Instead they reclined back into their choir stalls at about a twenty-degree angle, looking a bit funny and informal in their identical black robes, as if they might be leaning on the rail on an ocean liner’s ecclesiastical cruise, except with a psalm book, not a drink, in hand. The strange bow they did was equally fascinating, a deep, stiff, ninety-degree bow from the waist, making them look like picnickers who’d lost something in the grass. Fearing for my back, I never tried to imitate it.
At exactly one o’clock the short service ended, and the monks filed out toward the refectory for lunch, while the père hôtelier with a little wiggle of the hand nervously signaled for me to follow. What a jittery fellow! On the way he whispered that I should have been on the other side of the rope, in the front row. Damn! I had screwed up already! Yet it wasn’t so much an admonishment as it was an explanation of the privilege being afforded me.
“You have a right to be there,” he said, indicating that I should use the door from the courtyard, an area closed off to visitors, and this door opened to the inside of the rope. Which raised a question.
“Where am I allowed to go?” I asked, assuming that parts of the abbey were off -limits to the overnight guests.
He seemed surprised. “Anywhere. You are one of us.”
We entered the refectory, a breathtaking medieval hall over a hundred feet long, built in the tenth century. Both long walls were lined with beautiful windows that flooded the room with light, a welcome change from the dreary church. One of the walls was decorated with Romanesque arches, and the open, vaulted ceiling gave the room an airy feel. A row of tables, pushed together to form a continuous table perhaps a hundred feet in length, lined each of the long walls. The monks sat with their backs to the wall, facing one another across the room, mimicking the arrangement of the choir. A third row of tables, reserved for guests, ran plumb down the center, just so everyone could keep an eye on us.
The père hôtelier and I were the last ones to enter the room, and I was startled to see that the monks and several guests were all standing at their places, almost at attention, while just before me, a young monk stood poised with a silver pitcher of water and a matching bowl. The hotelier signaled for me to put out my hands, and a moment later, the abbot of l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille de Fontenelle did as abbots have been doing here for 1,358 years: he Officially welcomed me by ritually, and with humility, washing my hands.
Then, following the hotelier’s signal, I made the excruciatingly long walk to my assigned seat at the far end of the hall—my place was marked with a heavy silver napkin ring embossed with my room number, 13(!)—as the standing monks watched, getting their first look at the boulanger américain. (I’d soon learn that everyone had been anticipating
with curiosity my pending arrival.) We all stood at our places while the abbot said a brief prayer; then the monks all shifted down one or two places toward the front of the room to fill in any empty seats, and lunch was served.
Fearing that monastic life would leave me hungry, I’d planned to stock my room with snacks beforehand, but with the last-minute rush to beat the strike, there hadn’t been time. I needn’t have worried. Lunch consisted of a robust and well-prepared meal of beef bourguignon, incredible french fries—real Belgian frites, cooked, I suspected, in duck or goose fat since that’s the only way you get frites that good—lettuce picked that morning from the abbey’s own garden, and, for dessert, flan and strong black coffee.
My heart sank, however, at the sight of the beautiful-looking baguette, with a golden crust and perfect grignes, that sat on a simple breadboard at the center of the table. Oh, no, how was I going to compete with this? I tentatively took a nibble, then relaxed. It was more pleasing to the eye than to the palate. I knew I could make better bread than this. At least, I knew I could at home.
Meals at the abbey are eaten in silence—among the monks and guests, that is. As food was brought to the table by waiter-monks, the abbot, standing a few feet above us in a little perch built into the wall, began reading aloud and continued until lunch was over. The tone of his voice—a strange monotone chant—said “prayer,” but the words, as far as I could tell, said “history lesson.” I couldn’t make out exactly what the reading was about, but I recognized the words “Étas-Unis” and “américain,” so it certainly wasn’t ancient history. The other words I kept hearing were “histoire de Michelin.”
I figured that Michelin, in addition to writing travel guides, must also have a French history book, or even a series, titled Histoire de Michelin, sort of like the History of Herodotus or something. Later I would have a chance to ask Brother Christophe about it.
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